The Red Caboose-an Orphan's Journey

In 1960, Jeanette Van Zanten, a three-year-old girl from Sharon, Pennsylvania tragically loses her father to death. The setting begins in Western, Pennsylvania when the US Government siezed the family farm and her father, who belonged to the Moose Club, died from an alcohol-related illness after he was in a car accident. When her mother is unable to care for her and her six siblings, the family is uprooted from a family farm and relocated to Mooseheart, an orphanage in Illinois. Upon arrival to Mooseheart, the siblings are separated from one another and scattered to halls throughout the grounds of the orphanage where they at the mercy of strict matrons. Jeanette creatively adapts to the rigid lifestyle filled with rules and regulations, but never loses hope that someday she will be free. Once she attains her desired physical freedom and is on her own, she resiliently readjusts to life outside the orphanage and perilously navigates her way through adolescence into adulthood. Once on her own, she longs to have the family she never had but finds herself trapped not only in an unhappy marriage but also in a high mind control religion that is reminiscent of the structure of her childhood.

Jeanette was orphaned at the age of three when her father passed away and her mother was unable to care for her and her six siblings. After her father's death the family moved from Pennsylvania to Mooseheart, an orphanage in Illinios.  The Red Caboose is a memoir of the ten years she lived at the orphanage and the ten years it took her to acclimate to life outside an institution.  Jeanette's father immigrated to America from Holland in 1920 and she takes pride in her Dutch Heritage. Along with her husband Cliff, she traveled to Holland in 2014.  Together the couple manage a cottage industry raising dairy goats and selling goat milk soap.In addition to writing, Jeanette enjoys gardening, cooking, nature,  and walking her two corgi's Tasha and Tucker in the Allegheny National Forest of Pennsylvania.  She published Little Mill Creek Family Recipes & Sugar and Spice.